Sarah Graf

PhD Research Project: Land, Labour and Capital: Class Relations in West-African Farming Systems

In West African agriculture land is relatively abundant, while labour and capital constrain production. This leads to diverse informal contractual land, labour and capital relations, such as multiple forms of renting, moneylending, and sharecropping. The consequences of such relations for poverty and inequality within (West African) farming systems are not well understood, as current analyses focus on the smallholder farm household and do not adequately capture these relations. The thesis addresses this knowledge gap by combining the agrarian systems approach, which captures land, labour and capital relations as class relations with the farming systems approach.

Selected Publications

Graf, Sarah Lena and Carlos Oya, 2021. Is the system of rice intensification (SRI) pro poor? Labour, class and technological change in West Africa. Agricultural Systems 193.

Natalia Alekseeva, Stephan Baas, Galimira Markova, Hideki Kanamaru, Janek Toepper, Makie Yoshida, Mariko Fujisawa, Olga Buto, Sarah Graf, Cecilia Jones and Elisa Di Stefano, 2021. Chapter VII: Extreme exposure: a clearer picture of agriculture in the climate crisis. In: FAO. 2021. The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security: 2021. Rome.

WMO, 2020. WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019. World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. (Contributor on climate related risks and impacts).

Galimira Markova and Sarah Graf, 2020. Introduction to FAO’s damage and loss assessment methodology. FAO e-learning Academy, Rome.

Galimira Markova and Sarah Graf, 2020. Using FAO methodology to compute damage and loss. FAO e-learning Academy, Rome.

Graf, S.L., 2019. Labour, Class and Technological Change: The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in West Africa. MSc. Thesis, SOAS University of London.

Graf, S.L., Mack, A, 2018. Challenges of Implementing a Small Scale Solar Milk Cooling System: A Case Study in Western Kenya. BSc. Thesis, Universität Hohenheim.